Cretaceous Dawn Page 6

  “Giant crocodiles, birds with teeth—oh yes, I saw they had teeth—muddy water: it’s beginning to look like we came to the wrong beach for vacation.” Dr. Shanker waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, as if this was all a trivial annoyance, and sat down to put his loafers on. The swelling on his face was getting worse, but he’d scrubbed most of the blood away with a handful of the not-too clean-water, and he looked quite a bit better.

  “But we don’t want to jump to conclusions too soon,” he went on. “Whitney may be convinced, but then this time period is his specialty. I say we figure things out now. All the more, indeed, now that we’ve met the neighbors.” He turned to Frank, who was looking much better for the drink of water. “Am I allowed to talk physics now? Do we have your permission to discuss how we got here, and how we might get home?”

  Frank shrugged. “Certainly, we need to be active in our own cause. Can’t count on a rescue team showing up for some time, if at all. But this ring of stones is hardly a shelter; and I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. Finding food may not be so easy.”

  Julian’s stomach gave a loud growl. “Sorry,” he muttered, embarrassed. “Look, we’ve been here a few hours already, and I have a lot of questions. I want to know if this—translocation, is that what you called it?—if this is theoretically possible. And if so I want to know how we get home. Also, we should explore more, look for key species to support my time estimate.”

  “Typical scientist: wants to know everything,” Dr. Shanker said. “We’ve only just realized that we were actually grabbing beetles and such from another location, and reassembling them, as it were, in the vault. Now I don’t know what to think. Yorko: could we have temporal rather than spatial translocation going on?”

  Yariko looked blank for an instant, and Julian could understand why: the mental transition from Deinosuchus and finding water to the far-off lab was a hard one. She was seated on a fallen log, looking tense but not panicked. She let out a big breath and then focused on explaining the experimental results. She spoke plainly, bringing home the situation in a way that was all the more shocking for being plain.

  “Spatial and temporal translocation occurring together has not even been hypothesized. But whether we’ve moved through space or time, or both. . . ,” she glanced at Julian, “we may be able to get back to Creekbend. But the odds aren’t good.” She paused, looking around at each of the others.

  Frank grunted and then continued to look around him with darting eyes as if he was guarding an outpost under threat of imminent attack.

  “Go on,” Julian urged. “Tell us the details. Could you have predicted this?”

  Yariko shook her head. “Of course not. It’s all so new. But we do know a few things that might help.” She flicked an insect off her leg and went on. “As you know, we’ve been producing strange samples in the graviton vault. I’ve been studying these objects for a month now, and . . . they don’t persist. They disappear. I would put them in a bottle on the shelf and then come back the next day, and the bottle would be empty. My own guess now is that the objects were reverting to their original spatial coordinates—the place they came from, that is. If that’s the case, and such translocated objects aren’t stable, then perhaps we aren’t stable in this place either.”

  The others were silent a moment as they took in this idea. Frank stared at her, looking at the same time hopeful and resentful, angry and interested. Julian hardly knew what he felt himself; he wanted a full explanation, and he wanted to become unstable and “revert” as it seemed they might; but he was also beginning to feel a mounting excitement that made breathing difficult. If they had really fallen into the Cretaceous world, he could learn more in an afternoon than in a lifetime back home.

  Yariko took another deep breath and continued. “Even if my hypothesis is correct, even if these objects were returning to their original place, we are still far from safe. Only one-third of the samples ever reverted. That means that of the four of us, only one or two might possibly revert, or none of us. In addition, the equipment was in perfect working order when we produced the samples in the vault. We don’t know what condition it’s in now, after the explosion. So even if we could revert, the vault may not be there to take us.”

  Julian’s excitement dissipated as quickly as it had come. “You mean, if the lab was damaged, we might be stuck here forever?”

  There was a sharp clicking sound and they all turned, startled, to look at Frank. He was turned slightly away, as if he was shielding something with his body; the VHF antenna stuck up over his shoulder. Noticing the sudden silence he looked around, the radio clutched in one hand while his other hand fiddled with the knobs.

  “Oh please,” Shanker began, but Yariko stopped him.

  “It doesn’t do any harm to try,” she said. “Let him. He knows how to use it, which is more than we do.”

  Julian thought he understood the man’s nervousness; he himself was playing with his pocketknife to keep his hands busy.

  “We’ll obviously spend the night here,” Dr. Shanker said grimly. “More than one, I should think.” He reached out and pulled on Hilda’s ear, eliciting a thump of her tail.

  “But you say the beetles and such were unstable,” Julian said. “They went back to their original location, or time, or so it seems. Then we will too, right? That beetle you called me about,” and his voice got stronger as he remembered this fact, “the one I saw the picture of—it reverted in a few minutes, didn’t it? It was gone by the time I got to the lab.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Yariko continued. “I’ll draw you a diagram so you’ll understand the chances a little better.” She snatched a twig from the ground and began to draw rapidly in the soil. Her hand shook slightly, and she stopped and clenched her fist for an instant before continuing. That slight tremble, almost controlled, woke Julian up nearly as much as the crocodiles had. He realized that Yariko was afraid too.

  But when she spoke her voice was the same as always. “The objects first appeared in the vault; this square here. At first I kept them in jars in the back room—here.” She drew a quick sketch of the lab’s layout. “Most of them disappeared within minutes, hours, or days. After the first few days I began to study the patterns of disappearance. In fact, I spent nearly a week on this, at ONR’s unknowing expense. Probably killed my career already.” Yariko shook her head and Dr. Shaker gave a bark of laughter.

  “So, what did you find out?” Julian was beginning to understand, but he wanted her to get to the point.

  Yariko continued. “First, if we leave an object at its initial location, i.e., the vault, the reversion never occurs. It needs to be a certain distance away, and that distance depends on the mass of the object. Bigger things have to be farther away from the vault. Second, the bigger something is the longer it persists. That’s why we still had that rock to show you, Julian. It was the heaviest thing we’d produced, and it didn’t revert.”

  “What she means,” Dr. Shanker said, interrupting, “is that in order for us to have any hope of ‘reverting’ back to the vault, we’ll have to calculate the right location, and we’ll have to get ourselves there at the right time, based on our mass.”

  Julian frowned. “And naturally you need your IBMs for this sort of calculation?”

  “Not at all,” Dr. Shanker said, scratching his beard with a raspy sound. “The tensor equations are elegant enough . . . brilliant . . . it’s a terrible shame that they don’t give Nobel Prizes posthumously, or I would surely get one. Yorko, too,” he added hastily.

  Yariko nodded absently and went on. “The temporal latency is easy to calculate, because it increases predictably with the mass. For example, grains of dust disappeared within a few seconds. A pebble, ten grams maybe, about a third of an ounce, lasted forty-five minutes. If the same trend holds, then objects of our own size should persist for about two months. There is a certain margin of error, of course, about 5 percent, based on the size range we’ve had to observe.”


  “So . . . we wait for two months and see if we revert?” Julian thought about two months with Deinosuchus for a neighbor. A terrifying thought, but then again there was so much he could learn. . . . Another, unbidden thought came to him: two months with Yariko, nearly alone, no fiancé. . . .

  “I wish it were that simple,” Dr. Shanker said. “But there is the distance factor.” He looked at Yariko. “Yorko’s worked it all out.”

  “I did,” she said. “The spatial calculation is more theoretical. Reversion only occurred if the samples were moved the correct distance from the point of origin in the lab. The direction was crucial: the objects had to be displaced along a narrow band that was angled between 2 and 4 degrees north of west. It took me a while to figure out why the direction was so specific, but the reason is quite simple. Months back, when I first built the equipment, I aligned it against the back wall of the lab, which happened to face exactly two degrees north of west; and by chance, I’d stored the very first samples along that back wall.

  “But the distance—there the computations become more difficult. The equations are hairy—messy—very complicated. There’s no precedent for temporal translocation. Even now I don’t know how it would figure into the equation. If we assume it works the same as simple spatial translocation, we can calculate, based on our weight, how far we have to displace ourselves.”

  She paused and looked around at the others, but she almost appeared not to see them. Strangely, her abstraction comforted Julian: this was the Yariko he was most familiar with, absorbed in complex thought processes and equations, as excited about calculations as he was about new fossils.

  “How does that work?” he asked. “Why does it depend on mass?”

  “I just want to know what we need to do to get back to South Dakota,” Frank broke in. “And how we plan to set ourselves up for the night. It’s already late afternoon.”

  Julian ignored him. “Can you figure out how long we’ll take to revert, and where we’d need to be, from our average weight?”

  “Yes, I could,” Yariko said, simply, as if it were nothing to work out such things with a twig in the sand. “Give me half an hour without questions and I might have an estimate. But—”

  “Good,” Dr. Shanker said. “I’d work on it with you, but you get annoyed when I bother you.” He turned away from her. “Whitney, let’s put together a camp. We’re in the boy scouts again, eh?”

  Frank chuckled.

  Julian had never been in the boy scouts, and he wasn’t too excited about setting up a camp. Now that he was cooler and less thirsty, and Yariko was working out a plan for them to get home, he felt a great desire to explore this fantastic place. How could he possibly leave without learning everything he could first? Why, the knowledge he’d be able to take back. . . .

  “Whitney! Stop daydreaming and help me,” Dr. Shanker barked.

  The sun was reaching down to the forest and the light in the underbrush was rapidly getting dimmer. Frank couldn’t help much, but he snapped out advice as he tried to strike sparks between his pocketknife and a rough stone. Julian noticed that he used the file rather than the knife blade. A small pile of dry brown leaves and twigs was ready to take the spark.

  “Look at this,” Julian cried suddenly as he turned over a large rock. He stood and turned to Dr. Shanker. “There has been somebody here. Look.”

  On a flat part of the rock lines had been scored. They were partly filled in with soil but still plain to see: straight and slanted lines like text on a tablet. Somehow, Julian felt sure it was a word, a sign, an indication of human presence; but he couldn’t make sense of the marks. He squinted at the strange lines, his mind unconsciously adding a few strokes to turn them into English letters.

  “There’s an A,” he said, stooping and tracing it with his finger. “And here’s another one. This here could be a Y.”

  “Whitney!” Dr. Shanker’s voice was sharp. “You’re as bad as Frank. Stop trying to read the rocks and help me get a wall built. Seeing letters in a rock. . . .” With some difficulty he lifted the stone and carried it, bowlegged and staggering, to their chosen campsite.

  “But I saw. . . .” Julian followed, trying to protest.

  Shanker dropped the rock and stood breathing heavily and shaking out his arms. “You of all people ought to know how easy it is to see false meaning in natural objects. Happens all the time. I have a piece of driftwood at home that looks just like Ronald Reagan’s head.” He chuckled. “What would it mean, anyway? A rescue party came back for us, but accidentally got here before us, so they left us a message? Those scrapes on the rock aren’t new. Not a very effective rescue party, if you ask me.” He stumped off to find more rocks.

  Julian stooped again and turned the rock over, with some trouble. On a second look, the lines weren’t so straight or patterned. They were just gouges, natural mechanical weathering. He sighed, and followed Dr. Shanker. Perhaps he was looking for any excuse not to believe they really were stuck in the Cretaceous. He was careful not to look closely at rocks after that.

  By the time Yariko looked up from her dusty equations, they had a low wall of stones and sticks, two feet high, which half enclosed a flat area big enough for them all to lie down in. Several thick bushes screened off the end. Frank was directing them in setting up tall stakes between the stones when Yariko threw down her twig and said, “All right, I have some numbers. But I warn you it’s not promising.”

  She joined them in the small semicircle. “Using our average weight, I was able to calculate the distance that we’d need to travel. I did the calculations twice. I believe the distance will be two times ten to the fifth, or 200,000 times, that observed in the lab, which was eight meters or about twenty-four feet. In other words, 1600 kilometers. We need to displace ourselves 1600 kilometers in order to reach the correct location for temporal reversion.”

  “That’s a thousand miles!” Julian said. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Yariko gave him a lopsided smile. “The distance is the least of our problems. The difficulty is getting the right angle. Being half a degree off north or south when we set out could put us hundreds of miles off by the time we reach the end of our line. There is also the question of confidence in the equations. Putting it all together, there’s really very little hope.”

  “How confident are you?” Julian knew she was the most critical judge of her own work, and he didn’t want her ideas, which might be their only hope, dismissed because they didn’t meet her own too-high standards.

  “Well, the numbers are what they are,” Yariko said, with no modesty. “There’s no problem with the calculation. But I have reason to doubt the applicability of the formula I used—”

  “Just give it to us in English,” Frank said. “Are you saying you made a mistake?”

  “Of course not,” Yariko said, and Julian couldn’t help grinning at her shocked look. “There’s no reason for mistakes in such straightforward equations. There’s a check on the estimate, too: if my calculations are correct, the location we need should be exactly where our original mystery samples came from in the first place.”

  “Ah!” Dr. Shanker looked up with sudden interest. “But of course.”

  “Why of course?” Julian looked from one to the other. It seemed almost too easy, too coincidental.

  “Because the settings in the experimental run were always the same,” Dr. Shanker explained. “We were obtaining objects from one place, the same place each time. In order for us to be obtained, as it were, and end up back in the vault, we have to be in that exact spot. Assuming the settings are still intact, of course.”

  “Of course,” Yariko went on. “Almost too easy. Except for one thing.” She paused and looked at the others. “I had the brilliant idea of sending samples to the geology department, for analysis. Bits of rock and dirt from six samples that hadn’t reverted, from independent experiments. I expected the material would have a uniform composition, and would be from the same origin. I was right. So was J
ulian, with his guess on that pebble: the samples were igneous; apparently of recent volcanic origin. Very recent, even.”

  Yariko suddenly closed her fist around the twig and crushed it. “Of course, there are no volcanoes within thousands of miles of Creekbend, in any direction,” she said, and her voice went up a half-octave. “Certainly not active ones. So the thousand-mile distance estimate doesn’t match up with the place our samples came from. My calculations, therefore, seem to be off. I’ve checked them over several times, but I can’t see why the formula should be any different.” She opened her fist and the bits of twig spattered in the dust.

  Julian watched Frank’s fingers picking at the ground beside him. They lifted a smooth gray pebble and dropped it again, over and over. Dr. Shanker began to mutter disparaging comments about the geology department. Hilda laid her head on her paws and sighed.

  “There are volcanoes,” Julian said.

  Everyone looked at him. “Not in our own time, but in the Late Cretaceous. The mountains—the whole Cordillera—are the result of many geologic events. . . .”

  “Never mind the geology lecture,” Dr. Shanker said. “Cut to the point.”

  “Volcanic activity on the surface, a thousand miles west of here. . . . Yes, that would put you at the easternmost fringe of the Rocky Mountains. The Rockies are partly volcanic in origin. In fact, there’s a formation in southwestern Montana called the Boulder Batholith. I’ve been there to core for samples. In a straight line, the Boulder Batholith is about a thousand miles west of Creekbend. Maybe nine hundred miles.

  “That puts it almost exactly where you calculated. I can’t see where else your samples could have come from, in this geologic time—unless your distance estimate is way off. In that case they could have come from Alaska, Baja, or anywhere in between.”

  Yariko smiled again. “We could have saved you the travel for your cores, and given you fresh samples right there on campus.”

  Dr. Shanker interrupted her. “Yes, anywhere. Precisely. We don’t know if the distance estimate is correct. Even if it is, we don’t know if any of us will revert. We don’t know if the vault will be ready for us. It’s a long hike for a very slim chance, and the landscape in between is bound to be dangerous.”